A family text on her sister’s phone is what got a judge to sign off on the raid of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington home. Investigators had seized Sahra Noor’s phone earlier this year.
According to the New York Times, as reported by the New York Post, investigators were looking into whether Omar conspired to commit immigration fraud when she came to the United States. The messages on Noor’s phone helped them win approval for Homeland Security agents to search Omar’s home on Monday, where they took her phone, passport, notebooks and personal computers.
Noor, a health care executive and author who lives in Kenya, was subpoenaed in the case. She skipped a Rochester event on Thursday for her memoir, “Salt in the Snow: A Somali Immigrant Story,” citing a family emergency.
Before the raid, agents also collected DNA from Omar’s trash, sources told NewsNation. The evidence is expected to go before a federal grand jury in Minnesota, weighing whether Omar and her family lied when they immigrated in 1995. More than a dozen subpoenas have gone out. Omar has not been charged, and the allegations are unproven.
“This search was neither justified nor lawful.”
Omar’s lawyers, in their October 16 letter to federal prosecutors
On Friday, Omar’s lawyers demanded the immediate return of everything seized, saying agents never gave her a copy of the warrant and blocked her from her lawyers for over an hour. The Justice Department called the letter “riddled with false allegations and inaccuracies” and said its people complied with every court order.
Omar’s spokeswoman Jackie Rogers told the Times that President Trump has “spread lie after lie about the congresswoman” to justify an abuse of power. The raid landed less than a month before the November 3 midterms, with Omar up for reelection.
See also: the original raid and what agents took, and the reported end goal